Eclectic. Yes, let's call Taste Cafe — located in the three quaint downtown blocks of Safety Harbor — eclectic. You could also call this restaurant, which has received a surprising amount of buzz for a neighborhood spot in northern Pinellas, muddled, chaotic or unfocused, depending on your mood.
Taste serves three meals a day, starting with simple coffee and pastries at breakfast (plus a Sunday brunch), sandwiches and salads at lunch, and an oddly varied selection of tapas and entrees at dinner. There's also an extensive array of baked goods, a few beers on tap, and a small selection of wine by the glass and bottle.
Tables range from a massive high-top that dominates the center of the room to a cozy bar area, along with outdoor seating on Main Street's sidewalk. Look at the walls and you'll see modern paintings hung on metal latticework. Look toward the back and half-empty boxes of ingredients and drinks spill out into the dining room. Look to the counter and bins of Dum-Dum lollipops vie for space with a mish mash of cafe goods. Eclectic? Chaotic? I guess it depends on the time of day.
As a coffeeshop and lunch joint, the muddled atmosphere works just fine, setting a relaxed scene that fits Tastes's casual eats: egg and bacon on a croissant, quiche that's rich and a bit dense, salads that range from a typical caprese loaded with underripe tomatoes to a Tarpon Springs Greek with a big dollop of decent potato salad in the middle.
Sandwiches are anything but typical, with varying combinations of interesting ingredients that work together sometimes, and clash others. Grilled chicken with pesto and melted provolone is a winner, but chicken salad layered with hummus and artichokes suffers from the veggie's acidic brine. That hummus is better by itself on a vegetarian sandwich, topped with plenty of crisp vegetables, or in conjuction with a mass of tabouli and eggplant.
At night, the decor and menu dissonance reaches a grating pitch. At one table is a couple with their young daughter, celebrating the start of school with a slice of apple pie à la mode. Two separate couples are celebrating date nights, while another table has a group of gregarious wine drinkers, all seemingly crammed into the unforgivingly inelegant room.
Stick with Taste's tapas menu and you'll have a pleasant — if not exciting — meal. That hummus is on there, along with the usual array of mediocre cheeses, sliced meats and olives. On the hot side there are some tasty oddities, like slabs of crisp, fried queso blanco topped with what seems like jarred salsa jazzed up with mango.
The same salsa, minus the mango, comes with a simple dish of rosemary-scented, almost-burned roasted potatoes, along with a dollop of sour cream and a pile of pre-fab bacon bits. A giant portobello mushroom cap is stuffed with an overwhelming amount of creamy blue cheese under a blanket of melted provolone, two tastes that don't taste great together.
Entrees are — sadly — dismal across the board. A beef stroganoff special comes with big medallions of chewy, unseasoned meat coated in a featureless gravy atop egg noodles gone dry at the edges. Mojo pork are big slabs of tough, overcooked tenderloin doused in a citrusy water that does little to improve the unappetizing meat.
The depressing part of the experience, however, doesn't come until the dessert. Signs extol the virtues of Taste's "homemade desserts," and they do look tasty. However, that mile-high apple pie is loaded with undercooked fruit and a crust that comes across more like whole wheat tortilla than flaky pastry, while an oatmeal-apricot bar feels more like a dry pecan pie than anything with real fruit in it.
Just as I'm feeling a little sad for that school kid and her celebratory slice of pie, I try to reconfigure my expectations. Taste is not the sort of place that should be competing with the rest of the greater Bay area. It's a neighborhood joint, and in a neighborhood as small as Safety Harbor, I'm sure it serves a purpose.
Ideally, that purpose starts with coffee and ends before the sun goes down.
This article appears in Aug 26 – Sep 1, 2010.